Maniacal Labs

Phil was kind enough to drop us an email with this epic install of an AllPixel & PixelWeb controlled LED strip installed under his frosted glass desk: Clearly my black wooden workspace is no longer adequate. Great work Phil! We can’t wait to see more.

And now for something completely different! Not everything that Dan and I work on is LED related… For years, our local group of friends have a had a weekly dinner, referred to as Hang Out Time or HOT for short. It was at a different restaurant each week, chosen from a rotating list of options… or at least it was supposed to be. Our friend Miles managed the weekly event creation but then passed off the duties to me a couple years ago.

Ever since working on the Adafruit APA102 Disk, it seemed the next logical step was to apply the same idea to a Christmas tree. So, last year after all the holidays, when everything was on sale, I picked up a 7 foot tall white artificial tree. Green would just not do… too dark for all the color :) It’s still way to early to put up the tree in my mind but, in the interest of beta testing, I figured I would give it a pass this year.

After a long week at the Day Job™, I sought the catharsis brought about by creativity and making something. To that end, I took stock of what parts I had lying around. I had been wanting to do something with a couple of TinyTim LED boards I’ve had from previous projects. These displays were sent to us by our good friends at WyoLum. I decided I wanted to mount the 4 panels I had loose and make a nice-looking All-In-One 8x32 display.

Last week, we launched PixelWeb which comes with all of the animations in our animations repository but that only gets you so far. You want to add your own of course! Fortunately, it’s not a particularly complicated process and just requires adding a little extra information to your animation file so that PixelWeb knows what to do with it. Check out the video below and read up on the process on the PixelWeb Wiki to learn how.

A year ago we launched the AllPixel to much success on Kickstarter and, with it, BiblioPixel; our flexible, hardware agnostic animation framework. BiblioPixel makes writing and running your animations easy, and quickly gained in popularity; racking up over 20,000 installs in the last year. Today we are pleased to announce an exciting new update that brings BiblioPixel out of the command line and into your browser… PixelWeb! Along with PixelWeb, today we also release a major upgrade to BiblioPixel!

The Colossus LED display wasn’t just built to show off at things like SparkCon and MakerFaire. Honestly, that outing was a one-time-only deal. It was designed specifically for one patch of wall in my home office, so the intent was always to permanently install it there after its one weekend on the town. There was just one slight problem… This guy: EngineeringCat

MCM_Logo-01[1] We are pleased to announce that the AllPixel and PowerTap are now available in the USA direct from MCM Electronics! MCM sells a ton of great stuff and is even the official consumer supplier of the Raspberry Pi (which supports the AllPixel of course!

The 2014 NC Maker Faire was a huge turning point for Maniacal Labs. It was there that the idea for the AllPixel and what is now BiblioPixel got their start. It’s also where we showed off our first custom-built LED display, the 24x24 LPD8806 matrix. At nearly 24 inches square, and 1 pixel per inch, it was certainly impressive. But we left the Maker Faire with a desire to go bigger.

SparkCon_Thanks A Huge Thanks to everyone who came out and saw us at GeekSpark this weekend! We had a great time and were thrilled at the response we got from the giant display. If you want to know more about the AllPixel LED driver and the BiblioPixel Python library that were used to make the display, check out the AllPixel Info Page.